There's a blog on the Huffington Post titled "In Praise of Slow Sex". The author, Carl Honore, tells of a friend whose girlfriend actually texted during lovemaking. "It was kind of a mood killer," the guy lamented. However, instead of suggesting tantra lessons to his buddy, Honore suggests that our culture is at fault. He says that "in this media-drenched, multitasking, always-on age, many of us have forgotten how to unplug and immerse ourselves completely in the moment. We have forgotten how to slow down. Not surprisingly, this fast-forward culture is taking a toll on everything from our diet and health to our work and the environment. It's ruining our sex lives, too."

Similarly, a man named Carlo Petrini was outraged that a McDonalds was built at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome. He built the slow food movement, which has spread to 45 countries, with 65,000 members worldwide. To those members, slow food is actually a way of life, based not only on the pleasure of eating, but a commitment to community and the environment as well. What's more, slow food has expanded into the arena of city planning... with several towns in Italy banding together to form an organization called the Slow Cities movement – Citta Slow. Slow cities are characterised by a way of life that supports people to live slow. Traditions and traditional ways of doing things are valued. These cities stand up against the fast-lane, homogenised world so often seen in other cities throughout the world. Slow cities enjoy less traffic, less noise, fewer crowds.

Slow travel is an evolving movement that has taken its inspiration from nineteenth-century European travel writers, such as Théophile Gautier, who reacted against the cult of speed. Advocates of slow travel argue that all too often the potential pleasure of the journey is lost by traveling too fast. Slow travel is a state of mind which allows travellers to engage more fully with communities along their route, often favouring visits to spots enjoyed by local residents rather than merely following guidebooks. As such, slow travel shares some common values with ecotourism, preferring low-impact travel styles and trains over planes. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and even years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint – to record their memories and help them see better. Now, tourists try to "do" the Louvre in a single afternoon.

Slow art is an evolving movement championed by artists like Grayson Perry. The idea is to fight the demands of your agent and to slow down the production of art, fighting a trend that started with Picasso knocking out three works a day, every day of his life. Instead, Perry pleads, "Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands." He also pleads to the market to slow down as well, "So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen."

The art critic Michael Kimmelman calls it slow looking – all about investing time and attention to something that is easy to neglect – in this case, a work of art. Studies have shown that the average museum visitor spends well under a minute with any particular work of art. What happens when you spend an extended amount of time looking at one work? The art historian T. J. Clark has just written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic. Kimmelman also notes that at one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds and even thousands of books, but rarely with intensity.

And so, a full fledged slowness movement is underway, a tidal backlash against speed that is slowly moving into the mainstream. From schools to offices, at hospitals and gyms, in kitchens and bedrooms, people are waking up and wondering if faster is always better. Grassroots groups are cropping up worldwide. Japan's Sloth Club, Europe's Society for the Deceleration of Time, and the U.S.'s Take Back Your Time coalition advocate an more unhurried approach to life. Honore, who also wrote a book a couple of years ago called In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, predicts, "In their many and diverse acts of deceleration lie the seeds of a global Slow movement." 

As for sex, he explains that anyone can achieve slowness in sex... "Start by slowing down outside the bedroom. Trim your schedule so you have the time and energy for those little exchanges that stoke desire throughout the day - flirting, touching, stolen glances, conversation and whispered fantasies, small favors and gifts. Make the bedroom a Slow haven: no phones, no orgasm quotas, no deadlines; just two people in the moment together, going with the flow. Slip into a relaxed, sensual rhythm with massage, stroking, eye contact, breathing in unison, maybe even blindfolds. That may sound a bit cheesy, but, as the Pointer Sisters observed, it's the lover with a slow hand who makes the earth move."

So what's a busy, multi-tasking tantrika to do? Work with a branding coach to rebrand the old website with slowness? Just go ahead and declare yourself a slow sex coach? Is there some certification you can get? (Note: The OneTaste community jumped on the bandwagon quickly, and has been certifying slow sex coaches, in an effort to mainstream the principles of tantra.) Heck, there's even a new SuperSlow exercise studio in New York, apparently rebranding the thousand year old art of Tai Chi Ch'uan, the granddaddy of slowness. It's probably best to... move slowly on that decision. Tai Bo may have emerged from the traditional martial arts... but it can't possibly endure over the centuries as Tai Chi h as.